


The Harbinger

by rabbit_hearted



Category: Purple Hyacinth - Ephemerys & Sophism (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, heres this Very Sad Thing, im sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:14:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25850410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbit_hearted/pseuds/rabbit_hearted
Summary: When they tipped over the edge of the cliff, so, too, did a part of her.
Comments: 16
Kudos: 72





	The Harbinger

**Author's Note:**

> Written in the feeling of Roslyn, by Bon Iver.

When the yearly affair arrives to sweep her up once more, she slips into the undertow completely, surrendering to think of nothing more than them. 

It feels as though this day serves as penance for the easier days, the ones where she, regrettably, hardly thinks of them at all. But _this_ day, the ever-humbling harbinger, arrives bearing its tally-marked scoreboard, the sum of all of its rusted parts. 

She will make the pilgrimage alone, as she always does. Before she leaves, he kisses her reverently, as though memorizing the imprint of his mouth against hers. 

“Be safe, _mon amour,_ ” he says, winding her scarf around her neck. 

She will always return to this place, the precipice of it all. She stands on the cliff-side with her arms spread, branded by the unforgiving lash of an Ardhalis early winter, a bitter, unfeeling thing, adorned in swathes of gray. 

When they tipped over the edge of the cliff, so, too, did a part of her.

  
  
  


“Describe them to me, sweetheart.”

“I think I have a photo in the attic.” She shifts in his lap, and he tightens his grip around her waist and fixes her flush against his chest. 

“ _Non_ , _mon amour_. From your memory.” 

“Ah. From my memory.” 

“Him, first.” 

She pauses. The details that come first, of course, are the ones that won’t fit onto a canvas — a booming voice that ricocheted off of every surface before making its way back to you, like a recurring dream. Warm, calloused palms that swept away tears and rinsed her scrubby face at bath time and fixed warm glasses of milk when she couldn’t sleep. A penchant for spinning his own bedtime stories, tales of a red-haired girl who fought dragons and defended villages and always saved herself, in the end. 

She tips her head back and into him, eyes closed in recollection. “Tall. Taller than you, maybe six feet or so.” 

Kieran hums against the curve of her neck and fixes his pencil between his fingertips, studying the canvas shrewdly for a moment. Then, the scratch of graphite against canvas fills the quiet room as he begins to outline a figure, tentative strokes that drift into slow focus.

“What else?”

“An open face. Hard and soft, at the same time. All angles.”

“Like you, then.” 

“Oh?”

“Yes,” he murmurs. “Like a fox.” 

“He didn’t smile often, not for lack of want. He was just quiet. But when he did smile, you knew that you earned it.” Lauren swallows thickly, then, suddenly heavy with grief in the way it felt in the beginning, like being suspended within the swell of a wave. Kieran tips his pencil upward, just so, in the vaguest crook of a grin, like an interlude. 

“Tell me about his eyes.”

“His most expressive feature. He spoke with his eyes. Wide, warm.” 

He nudges the edge of his thumb against the canvas to soften the outline. “Gold, like yours?” 

“No, gray.” Like a storm, but a quiet one — a warm rain that splits the sky in two in quiet, healing deluge, gone as quickly as it arrived. “The gold came from her.”

“Mm. And her?”

Big, in everything she did. Expansive and expressive, like a wide angle shot. Where he was nuance and subtlety, she was overt and intentional, all bold strokes and wild gesticulations, always the last to finish laughing, always the center of gravity. Wide, bracketed grins and full hands, hands holding wildflowers she picked on the side of the road, holding fledgling birds she’d vow to nurse back to health, holding penny candy she’d pull out from behind Lauren’s ears and slip under her pillow case, only to be discovered later, when she’d least expect it.

Together, they created something natural, sensible, like the joining of two elements. His eyes would always find hers in a room, a ship seeking its harbor, a compass its true north. 

“So different from him, but the same, too. She smiled with all of her teeth.”

When he leans forward to capture the shape of her mouth, he rests his chin against Lauren’s shoulder. “You’ll tell me if this gets too hard for you,” he says softly, a quiet command shaped like a question. He will never force her, but he will always nudge her into the hard things. Like waves molding sea glass, the quiet repetition necessary in creating something beautiful. 

“I will.” 

He sets back to work, and for a short while they lapse into the sort of comfortable silence you can only achieve when you truly know a person, punctuated only by the _shick_ of graphite against canvas and the tick of the grandfather clock.

“His hair was dark, like mine. Red.” Dark red, like autumn leaves, wilted only for the purpose of giving way to something wonderful. “Hers, too, but lighter.” 

His free hand twists a coil of her hair around his fingertip absently as he works, the way they always are together. Linked by their fingertips or pressing their palms flush against the small of the other’s back or pinching the hem of the other’s coat. Always tethered, like a kite to its string.

“You borrowed something from both of them.” 

“I suppose you could say that. It’s all I have now.” 

Kieran brings his palm up to cup the nape of her neck. “Not all.” He pulls his eyes from the canvas to meet hers. 

“No?”

“Your memories.” His brows pull in and he appraises her quietly, intently, as though committing her expression to memory. “The most important thing.” He brings his thumb to the corner of her eyes when they well with hot tears. She feels a surge of love, then, consuming in the way it always is — sharp and visceral, like a rush of blood to the head. 

“Don’t look, now. I want the rest to be a surprise.”

Every so often, he leans close to her ear to ask her a question — _How do you remember the shape of her eyes, darling?_ And she will say round, and exceptionally bright, especially when she smiled and they crinkled and folded little divots at the edges. _And the bridge of his nose, then_ — _flat, like this, or curved a bit at the end?_

Curled into his chest, she leans against the tide of his movements — a vague twitch of his fingers, a shift of his posture, an inhalation — the tell-tale indicators that he is hard at work creating something where nothing once was. Before she met him, she thought art to be a logical, practiced thing. And then he arrived, smelling of camphor and acrylic, stained by shades of gray, and he taught her that art is not a logical thing at all, but an unpredictable, untamed one. A discipline you must nurture into existence laboriously, fueled both by the spark of a fit of passion and the steady flame of great intention.

Lauren drifts to a dreamless sleep, lulled by his breath at her ear, his free hand traversing lazy trails up and down her spine. There is no way to tell how much time they’ve spent, like this, gnarled together like the rings of a tree trunk, solidified by soil and wind in the drifting hours. 

She blinks into wakefulness to find the candle nearly exhausted down to the quick, her husband a wisp of an outline in the flickering light, spine curved over the canvas like a question mark. 

“I was just about to wake you,” he says, tapping his paint brush against the lip of a mug. “It’s all done, I think.” 

She chuckles. “You think?”

“Well,” he says, setting his brush down, “Knowing where to end it is always the hardest part.” He dries his hands on a towel and brings his palms up to the sides of her face, still turned into his chest. “Are you ready?” 

She draws in a breath, inexplicably nervous, and then turns to the canvas.

Rachel and Alexander Sinclair are suspended in graphite and paint within a moment in time. Looking at the photo nearly has the effect of encroaching on a private conversation, as they don’t stare ahead but rather at each other, leaned in towards one another in a mannerism so painfully familiar Lauren cannot discern how Kieran could have possibly known how to capture it in the rendering. His arm at her waist, hers slung around his shoulders, both breathlessly happy: She in her smile, him in his eyes, exactly the way she remembers. 

Lauren spends what feels like a lifetime looking at them.

“It’s...” She draws in a ragged breath. “I don’t know what to say.” 

He chuckles low against her ear, then, and she feels it straight to the core of her, like rainwater seeking root. “It was all you, _mon amour._ I just translated.”

Her tears spill with silent, reckless abandon, tangling in her hair and falling into her palms, and he sits with her, letting her feel the wide, impossible breadth of it all. And then she turns to him, in that expression he recognizes so well in her, one he’s seen in so many iterations. 

“I love you,” she says, quietly, her gaze bright with conviction. He cannot understand what he’s done for her, breathing them back into existence, in this way. “I love you.”

“And I, you.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this is a short, sad little thing I wrote. I woke up at 3:00am this morning with the following fragment in my head: "She feels it straight to the core of her, like rainwater seeking root."
> 
> Thanks for reading, my wonderful friends!
> 
> -Rabbit


End file.
